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Published: January 30th 2005
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Yes, It's True!
This is about as much speed as we could get going around this tiny little ice rink. On Sunday the 16th of January, we finally got around to going out on the Christmas/Winter themed date that I won in a game of rummy. Actually, the activity which we choose as the focal point of our outing was one that we had been planning to do since before I even won the date. For our date, we went Ice skating on the Eiffel Tower. What an experience! This year was something like the first time in 50 years that the city of Paris has decided to construct an ice skating rink on the first floor of the Eiffel tower. In fact, we wouldn’t have even found out about if it were not for our relatives back home. A lot of you read about it in the papers and let us know what was planned. I’ve run across many Parisians who did not even hear about it. It was hardly advertised here at all.
It was great, we only had to pay for the ticket to get up to the first level of the tower, and the admission and skate rental was free to anyone who got up there. It was a very cute little ice rink, and was not
Tyler Skating
And he tried to pretend that he didn't know how to do it! really busy. In fact, they probably didn’t advertise so that it would be empty; the rink was so small. We got pretty lucky, it was pretty sunny, and we had the rink practically to ourselves for the first half of our visit. We took a lot of pictures, enjoyed the view and the unique experience.
We also met a very cute French couple who asked us to take their picture. I shouldn’t say that they were a couple; it was a mother and her 4 year old son. He was so cute! He fell down about fifty times, but he was still having a blast. Actually, Tyler took some video with his camera of one of his really impressive spills. It was funny, he would be skating, then he would falter, loose his balance, hop around for a second trying to regain his balance, and then BOUM! he would fall on his butt and laugh! We were both really entertained.
After we were done skating , Tyler and I did a quick walk around the first level of the tower, looked at an exhibition that was set up for the centennial (the French love anniversaries), explaining the history of the
tower; who visited it, when they visited it, and what role it played in the wars, sciences, and movie stars careers. It was pretty cool.
To finish off our date, Tyler took me out to lunch, at which point we discovered a possible reason why the Eiffel Tower was deserted, that is to say that there was a RATP (metro/RER) strike going on. So, we decided to walk along the Seine down to Saint Michael’s fountain (near Notre Dame). Despite the fact that it was a little chilly, the sun was out and we had a nice little stroll. Of course, once we decided on a (admittedly touristy) restaurant, we were pretty hungry. The bistro was very good, and the lunch menu was a lot of food for the price. I think we sat for about 2 hours enjoying our meal. It was a very unique experience, and a date I will not forget.
Later that week, Wednesday in fact, we went to a Green Day concert; how painfully American. No really, it was a great concert, with flames and banners and all that jazz. Also, it was pretty funny because their drummers “Rock name” is Tre Cool. Well in
The Only Ad.
This is the only advertisment for this event that I saw... and that was posted on the first floor of the tower. So funny! French the word tres means very and he is originally from France. I was kind of bummed out that they didn’t have him get up and speak some French to the crowd. However, that didn’t stop their lead singer from saying Bonjour Paris! like a million times. It has been a long time since I have been to such a large scale concert, and I had a really enjoyed myself. I think that too often, at least in my experience, music becomes a far too pretentious hobby/ life style. I usually don’t enjoy concerts because it seems like 75% of the people who belong to that type of music (be it punk or “real punk” or rock or whatever) are snobby and rude to everyone else who isn’t “into” the music enough. However, this concert was not at all like that, I got to just enjoy myself, jump around and be silly. It was great! There was even a young fifteen year old French girl there with her parents, and her mom was standing up and dancing with her the whole time. It got really amusing towards the end when they covered a Queen song. Tyler had been to one of their concerts before and was right when he told me what a fun show they put on.
I wanted to buy one of their t-shirts, because their new record is “American Idiot”, and I thought it would be funny to wear that around Paris. Unfortunately, they were ridiculously expensive. I guess my accent will have to speak for itself.
Aside from these two events, January was mostly spent taking finals and laying around. The weather was (to our dismay) getting progressively worse instead of better and we had to stay inside a lot. It is difficult for us southern Californians to get used to dealing with winter weather. We were already starting to get prepared for all of our visitors who were to start coming in March. One thing that the weather did not stop us from doing was going to the bi-annual “Soldes”- sales. The malls were packed, it was worse than Christmas time. Tyler and I bought some new clothes, new shoes, and we each got a pair of rollerblades. Tyler paid for mine as an early birthday present, and I love to rollerblade around Paris whenever the rain stops. Everybody here rollerblades. In fact, there is a huge city wide three hour long skate each Friday night (when there is no rain). Several thousand people participate each time. We can’t wait to go.
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